There has been advanced plant phenotypic functional analysis which observes the growing of a plant having changed noted genetic information in a gene arrangement by changing environmental conditions (e.g., sunshine duration), measures the difference in change in the form in a growing process, the leaves or the overall shape of the mature plant, and the difference in the color of the leaves or root, and specifies a phenotypic function from the results.
In recent years, an enormous amount of plant genetic information has been clarified to advance functional analysis for the obtained enormous amount of genetic information. It is important to make all-inclusive measurement throughout a growing process including even small changes difficult to discriminate by human eyes in the shape, the color difference and the changed state in the growing process.
In growing process measurement, a growing process when changing genetic information and environmental conditions has been observed by a measuring work at fixed intervals, e.g., once a day or once per a few days. In manual measurement, there is performed growing storing of noted points of an observed object, such as the length of a root, the size of leaves and a growing angle, which are easily quantified. In this case, there is typically performed a measurement method of making measurement at long-period intervals, e.g., one day or more, to note large changes. Actually, studies of experiments using such method have been advanced and their results have been shown in the form of theses or presentation at conferences.
As a method of automatically performing growing storing, there is an image monitoring system using a camera. Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. Hei 6-138041) proposes a system for monitoring whether the growing state of a plant is good or poor. This system captures an image of the growing state of a seedling using a camera, evaluates the captured image, and automatically determines whether the growing state is good or poor.
As an automatic storage system using a camera, there is a field monitoring a suspicious person or object, although the field of a photographed object is different. In the monitoring field, there is proposed, in order to determine a suspicious person or object, a system which captures an image of a monitored area at fixed intervals or continuously using a camera, evaluates differential information on some adjacent images in capturing time by image processing, and gives an alarm when any change occurs.
As the proposal of a monitoring system, there is Patent Document 2 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. Hei 11-110530). This proposes that changes in images chronologically captured are evaluated, and the storing intervals of the images are dynamically changed based on the evaluated value to reduce the storage capacity of the images. Such monitoring system evaluates two or some images before and after capturing time which are handled for evaluating changes in shape and uses captured images in a relatively short time such as a few hours or a few minutes. The influence of an operation error of a camera or changes in angle of an object due to vibration of a stage fixing the camera or the system itself is less.
The growing monitoring system of Patent Document 1 proposes that comparison with a previously known plant growing process is performed to determine as compared with a previously known growing state whether a growing state is good or poor.
Non-Patent Documents 1-5 propose systems conveying cases for growing plants to sequentially capture images taken out before a camera.
Patent Document 3 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-50996) proposes that a position detecting mark is attached to a case growing a plant in photographing, the mark position in a captured image is detected, and the image is corrected with reference to its physical position.
[Patent Document 1] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. Hei 6-138041
[Patent Document 2] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. Hei 11-110530
[Patent Document 3] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-50996
[Non-Patent Document 1] Presentation at conference: Tanabata, T., Ishizuka, T., Takano, M., Shinomura, T., The rice growth monitoring system for the phenotypic functional analysis, The 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, Edmonton, Canada, proceedings p. 67, Aug. 3-7, 2002
[Non-Patent Document 2] Description articles of proceedings: Tanabata, T., Ishizuka, T., Shinomura, T., The imaging processing system for the phenotypic functional analysis, Proceedings of Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers, 86: 945-948, 2003.
[Non-Patent Document 3] Presentation at conference: Ishizuka, T., Tanabata, T., Shinomura, T., The development of the rice growth automatic monitoring system, The 26th Annual Meeting of The Molecular Biology Society of Japan, Program and speech summaries, p. 1011, 2003.
[Non-Patent Document 4] Presentation at conference: Ishizuka T, Tanabata T, and Shinomura T, Rice growth imaging system for phenotypic functional analysis from middle seedling to mature plant, Proceedings of International Genetic Resources Workshop on the Genus Oryza. pp. 81-83, 2003.
[Non-Patent Document 5] Web publicly-shown articles: Tanabata T., Ishizuka T., Shinomura T., The Rice Growth Monitoring System for The Phenotypic Functional Analysis, http://www.gs.dna.affrc.go.jp/SY-1108/, Aug. 16, 2003.